I recorded this video back in July of this year. Now looking back, I can’t believe how much the market cap for crypto currencies has grown and how fast. Let’s look at some price comparisons from then til now:

I made this video 5 months ago talking about how to buy Bitcoin in Canada. The video is still relevant and talks about buying Bitcoin using ATMs, Coinbase.com, Quadriga CX and more. Hands down, the fastest and easiest way to get started with Bitcoin is still coinbase.com. Use my link and get $10 worth of Bitcoin for free when you buy $100.

Most Common Google AdWords Mistakes That’s Draining Your Budget

Using Google AdWords is a great way to get new clients but if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can cost you a lot more than it should. In this post I will outline the most common Google AdWords mistakes I see people make and how to avoid them.

Keyword Match Types

Believe it or not, there are four different ways you can target keywords in your Google AdWords campaign. Most people don’t know and simply use the ‘broad match’ keyword type. The problem with broad match is that your ad will show for numerous keywords that are ‘similar’ to your keyword that might not be leading to conversions. Here are the four types of keyword match types: broad match, modified broad match, phrase match and exact match.

Broad Match: The default match type where your ad will show up for your selected keyword, misspellings, synonyms, related search terms and more.

Broad Match Multiplier: Your ads will show on searches that contain the term and close variation but not synonyms. For broad match multipliers all you need to do is add a “+” sign in front of your keywords.

Phrase Match: Your ads will show on searches that match your phrase or close variations of that phrase. To enable this option put your keywords in quotes. For example “keyword” or “my keyword phrase”.

Exact Match: Your ad will show when the exact phrase is searched. To enable this option, use the “[” symbol around your keywords. For example [my keyword phrase].

Here’s a quick video explaining the different types of keyword match types:

Use Negative Keywords

Google AdWords allows you to use negative keywords that are not a good match for your product or service.

Google AdWords Negative Keywords

Get a good list of keywords that you don’t think will result in business, here are some examples to get you started:

free

cheap

torrent, torrents

youtube

Kijiji

craigslist

ebay

Here is a good way to find negative keywords. Click on one of your campaigns, then click on keywords, then click search terms. These are all the search terms that your ad showed up for. Find the ones you don’t want and add them in the ‘negative keywords’ tab. Here you can add negative keywords by campaign or ad group level.

Send Visitors to Targeted Landing Pages

Once people click on your ad, don’t send them to your homepage. Instead send them to a targeted landing page specific to your product or service. Let’s use pest control for an example. If someone is searching the keyword “Raccoon Removal Toronto”, you want them to land on a page talking specifically about raccoon removal, not generic text about pest control in general. This will also help boost your quality score because the ad looks more relevant to Google. For this example, this is what I would do:

Your text ad title and description should have the word “Racoon Removal Toronto’

Direct them to a landing page: www.pestcontrol.com/Raccoon-Removal-Toronto

Make the landing page content specific to Racoon Removal and if possible add video and pictures of raccoons.

Use Ad Extensions For All Your Campaigns

There are a bunch of different ad extensions available in your AdWords account and more are probably coming. Here are the most common ad extensions that you should be using: call extension, sitelinks, callouts, location, price, app and review.

Call Extension: Displays your phone number, if a user is coming from a mobile device, they can click to call you. I would say this is the most important ad extension for service businesses.

Sitelinks Extension: Here you can link to relevant pages on your website, for example your pricing page or contact us page.

Callout Extension: Here you can add general information like “24/7 Phone Support” or “Free Consultations” etc.

Location Extension: Here you can add your business information that is linked from your Google My Business account. Users can click on the location link and open it up in Google Maps.

App Extension: Have a mobile app? You can add a link to download it here

Review Extension: Add a link from a review site about your business, here’s an example that I used for one on my clients and boosted our click through rates:

Google AdWords Review Extension

Conversion Tracking

The most overlooked and in my opinion the most important. If you’re not tracking conversions in Google AdWords, it’s hard to calculate your ROI. Tracking conversions is important because it will help you differentiate good keywords that are driving you business and bad keywords that are draining your budget. Another plus of tracking conversions is that once you have enough conversion data, you can tell Google that you are willing to spend x amount on a conversion and essentially pay per lead instead of pay per click. Google will look at your conversion history and automatically bid higher on keywords that it thinks will result in a conversion. This is very powerful if done correctly but you can’t enable this option in AdWords if you are not tracking conversions. Here is a quick video I made that shows you how to track conversions in Google AdWords:

How to Optimize Your Contact Form for More Conversions

Every website has or should have a contact form so visitors can easily contact you. Most people just throw up a simple contact form and never test it. You should always test out different designs and form fields to see which one converts the best. From my experience, these are the most important factors for customizing your contact form to get the most amount of conversions:

Image Above the Form

Have a nice image above the form which attracts attention. Don’t simply write ‘contact us’ its boring and your conversion rate will definitely be lower. Here are some examples:

The image above the form tells the visitor exactly what they’re gonna get by filing out the form. The red arrows draw attention and point to the form.

Optimize Your Submit button

Don’t just write ‘submit’ for the submit button. Be more creative, I like using the word ‘get’ and reinforce what the user will be getting by submitting your form. I use this website to create appealing submit buttons for forms, check it out: buttonoptimizer.com.

Less Fields Equals More Conversions

From my experience, the less form fields you have the more conversions you’ll get. Do you really need someone’s address or postal code right now? Remember this form is to get your foot in the door, not to make a sale right away. Keep it simple, use the minimum amount of fields. Most of my client website’s I only ask for Name, Email and Phone number and usually the phone number is not required.

Make Your Form Mobile Friendly

More and more people are going to be visiting your website from a mobile phone or tablet. Test out your form to make sure it works on all devices. For this reason I would also recommend to have your form in one column, so it works properly with responsive web design.

Captcha Codes, Are You Human?

Having a captcha code will also reduce the amount of conversions you get. I use a plugin called Gravity Forms on my websites that has a feature called ‘honeypot’. Honeypot drastically reduces the amount of fake submissions your form gets, so if your contact form is constantly getting fake submissions look into enabling honeypot instead of a captcha code.

Google Recaptcha

If you must have a captcha code and tried using honeypot but still getting nailed with spam, I would recommend Google’s recaptcha. Chances are that your visitor is already logged into their Google account so all they need to do is click ‘I’m not a robot’ to verify. Even if their not logged in, they will need to click on a bunch of images instead of typing in some hard to read letters.

In Conclusion

Every website has different needs and no one contact form will work for all websites. Test different variations yourself to see which one leads to the most conversions. Questions, comments or concerns? Contact me.

What is AMP and do you need it?

What is AMP

AMP short for ‘amplify’ stands for ‘accelerated mobile pages’. AMP is a project backed by Google to make web pages load faster on mobile devices. It works by restricting certain elements that slow down page loads and also loads a cached version of your website from Google servers. AMP has been around for a while but just recently it started showing up in search results like the image above.

Using AMP on your website is great because your website loads instantly (seriously, it’s instant). You already know that loading times can impact your website’s user experience and also impact your conversion rate, so setting up AMP for your website is a no brainer.